Reply To: Security

Hi rpjohnst,

For low-level hardware things I’ll leave that to Ivan or someone else formally of Mill Computing.

However, for all hardware Linux runs on, memory management, pids/threads and the like are also an abstraction. Where there’s more required than hardware provides, you’d never see a difference in code, as that’s also abstracted: that sort of thing is handled the same way virtual memory is. That a pid is 32 bits is purely a housekeeping detail that is convenient for the software, and has no connection with the hardware it runs on or its limitations. All those tables can be swapped out as needed by the OS to handle as many as desired.

And, seriously: I’d be shocked if there’s a single CPU with any number of cores that Linux runs on that you’ll find 2^22 threads/processes in-use at any given time 😉